Industry Perspective: Don’t Believe the Hype—MPEG-4 Lives On

In primary and secondary schools, colleges, universities, and in an increasing number of corporations and government institutions, Apple Macintosh, Unix, and Linux computers, as well as wireless personal digital assistants (PDA), have a fair share of desktop space along with Windows machines. MPEG-4 is being viewed today on all of these platforms in addition to set-top boxes, while proprietary solutions typically stumble to achieve this level of ubiquity.

In a recent commentary on www.streamingmedia.com, Jan Ozer stated that MPEG-4 also sports the obligation to pay royalties, not only on encoders and decoders, but also on content. This is incomplete and misleading.

First, while there are royalties on encoders and decoders, they are paid by the vendor who may or may not pass them on to the user. For example, Apple's QuickTime is free and plays MPEG-4 quite nicely. VBrick's StreamPlayer plays MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 and has a small license fee.

There is a royalty only for "remunerated content" such as for pay TV. Since the vast majority of streaming video is available without a fee, there is no royalty. And the fee for remunerated content is very small, presenting more of an administrative challenge than a significant cost.

In October 2003, I stated the case for open standards (see article here), and suggested that the world would be a different place if we had to purchase a different TV to view each channel for lack of standards. Of course, nowadays you can continue along without codec standards as long as you can download such codecs to your Windows PC, Apple Mac, PDA, Linux, Unix, set-top box, and so on. Supporting a plethora of proprietary codecs is a problem if you want to keep the cost of the decoding device low due to storage and memory requirements, and if you are trying to achieve the holy grail of all technology: simplicity.

Like other over-hyped technologies, MPEG-4 is quietly solving real problems and becoming a pervasive means to deliver audio and video in a multi-platform and multi-vendor world.